


the sun, the moon, the stars all revolving around my earth

by kwritten



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Dark!Charlie, F/F, Female-Centric, Miles Matheson (mentioned) - Freeform, POV Female Character, Poesy Musings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-27
Updated: 2015-09-27
Packaged: 2018-04-23 14:16:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4880008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>prompt #47; They are Gods, and she, the unbeliever.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>Sometimes, when she watches them laugh around the fire, the yellow light reflecting off their smiling faces, she grimaces because in those moments, when they are raw and unaware, they really do seem to think that they are set apart, that they are the sun and the moon and the stars circling around the earth and keeping it spinning. </i></p><p> </p><p>  <i>Is she the earth? Another meaningless sphere waiting for their light to shine down upon?</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	the sun, the moon, the stars all revolving around my earth

_I wish I could say I was the kind of child_  
who watched the moon from her window,  
would turn toward it and wonder. 

 

There’s an answer somewhere lurking in the skin. She can nearly taste it, running her tongue along the ridges of muscle and bone like a beggar starving at a feast. “Tell me the answer,” she whispers, head bowed, fingers prying, prying, prying for purchase, for absolution. But she never asked a question, which probably says something more about her than this whole damn world she’s somehow struggling to survive in. 

 

“Sometimes,” she says, covered in dirt and sweat and a stink that can’t be washed out no matter how long she scrubs her skin with sand and soap, “I wish I remembered.”

Nora didn’t look up, her long hair streamed wet down her bare back, she probably didn’t want to know, wanted to continue bathing in the quick-moving river as though the water rushing past could wipe away all the things she had ever done. 

“I wish I remembered, the way that you do, the way things used to be.”

She said it quietly enough so that the current washed away her words the same way it took away their sins, as if this wish was her deepest sin, a desire to be one of the broken ones. To be like them, to understand the very things they wished they could forget. 

They washed in silence, hunted in silence, ate in silence, fucked with a whisper, fell asleep without touching. 

 

 

They share a joke, a glance, a story that can’t be fully told, and something inside of her grows harder, where before she was only softness. Miles says once, _you’re a marshmallow, Veronica Mars_ and she can’t tell if it’s an insult or a compliment. Was this Veronica a hero or a villain? She doesn’t dare ask, there’s too many things she’ll never understand, never remember, never see, never care about. But it sticks, Charlie Matheson a marshmallow. She remembers those, found a stash in an abandoned house a few years back when she shouldn’t have been wandering off by herself. Their softness felt like a down pillow in her mouth, their sweetness made her sick to her stomach. She remembers wanting them all the time just after the world went to hell, talked to her mother long into the night about rich hot chocolate and foamy marshmallows floating on top. Charlie Matheson, a marshmallow, that’s what she’s supposed to be. But all these things she can’t touch, all the ways in which they walk in a world she can’t access, hardens her. 

 

 

“It’s changing you,” Nora says, staring up at the stars. It’s a warm enough night that she lies naked on top of their bedroll without shivering. 

Charlie sits up, trailing her hand across Nora’s bare skin, shivering with the intimacy of it, “What? This?” She hopes so. She hopes that everyone that saw her knew that something about her was different, that the glow she felt inside was reflected on her skin. She knew there was something childish about this, something petty and small, something that had nothing whatsoever to do with good sex or love and had everything to do with her trying to prove herself to… 

“Them,” Nora draws the blanket up over her body and rolls on her side, facing away from her. “They’re changing you. Him. Them. Whatever. You should get out while you still can.”

“What about you?” 

There was no answer. 

Somewhere in the silence there always lingered the effortless feeling, the unspoken truth. _One of these things is not like the others._ She thought maybe there was a sign, an action she could take, that would prove to them once and for all that she was no different than them, their cosmic, melodramatic, operatic bullshit didn’t make them special, didn’t make them any more or less dark or hardened or sensitive than her. 

Besides, they weren’t what was changing her at all. 

 

 

There’s a question lurking somewhere beneath her skin, something that defines her or defies her, or removes the potential for an answer that they aren’t ready to hear. In towns and cities and little backwater farms, there are rumors and stories and horrific tales of the people she sits around the fire with each night. Her name will never be known to them, her story will never matter, the way Nora’s face opens when she licks at her skin, the way they stink and itch and bleed like mortals, the way they all love to hate each other, this isn’t what will be remembered. They are too far beyond the reaches of the simple men toiling just to live. As if their sweat and tears are somehow different. 

Sometimes, when she watches them laugh around the fire, the yellow light reflecting off their smiling faces, she grimaces because in those moments, when they are raw and unaware, they really do seem to think that they are set apart, that they are the sun and the moon and the stars circling around the earth and keeping it spinning. 

Is she the earth? Another meaningless sphere waiting for their light to shine down upon?

 

 

“Sometimes,” she whispers, leaning over Nora, twisting her dark hair between her fingertips, pressing her body flesh against flesh like a penance. “I wish I remembered.”

Nora doesn’t wake up, her long eyelashes a fan against her skin, she sleeps deeper these days than she did in the beginning, getting used to a warm body lying beside her at night again, as if Charlie didn’t know who she thought she was in the beginning, as if she didn’t see the fire in Nora’s eyes when her uncle spoke. 

“I wish I remembered, the way that you do, the way things used to be.”

She said it more for the sake of the night sky than the woman beneath her fingertips, a confession, a sin. “I wish I was there, when you were, before everything fell apart, when you fucked a king and called it love. When they fought together instead of against each other.”

When their darkness was born, when they scraped their way from the bottom of a barrel full of fish, and ripped apart a country to make their own kingdom. She wished she had been there, watching it all from the front lines. 

They are just men after all, just mortal, nothing special. 

Just like her. 

 

 

This is her answer and her question and her only sin and the source of the hardness that grows beneath her breast, she doesn’t long for the light - for the time before the end. She doesn’t dream at night of clean sheets and computers and sparkling lights flashing across the sky and air travel, she dreams of the moments that made them all into the monsters she travels with. 

She is an innocent traveling in a pack of wolves, eating their leftover scraps, and finding it too pleasurable to care that she should stop.


End file.
